Limehouse

Austerity Writes Back

ISSUE ONE SPRING 2012

Limehouse

Austerity Writes Back

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emily foster/INTROduction

photo story/the end of north morgan

emily foster/graphic writing

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sophia blackwell/my affair with chick-lit

north morgan/highlights of miserable lives

bobby nayyar/love & business

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emily foster

introduction

Chick lit, suicide, delusional memories, difficulties in writing, and hapless love are probably the things you are thinking about right now, as we emerge into what promises to be a glorious spring. This is lucky as these are the subjects of the first ever issue of limehouse magazine: a showcase of brand new writing from our leading authors Sophia Blackwell and North Morgan, and the Limehouse team of Bobby Nayyar, and me.

Austerity Writes Back is the theme for this issue, as we have now published three debut novels, each of them written during this recession. Our next issue, coming this autumn, will be on something altogether different: poker.

Enjoy!

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sophia blackwell

my affair with chick-lit

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a couple of years ago, my ex and i went to see a streetcar named desire at the donmar.

Our breakup was something like five days old. We weren’t eating or sleeping and, like Tennessee Williams’ heroine, we were borderline crazy; but this was Rachel Weisz we were talking about, and we weren’t going to miss that.

Her portrayal of Blanche was perfect. At one point, she cried out, ‘I don’t want realism – I want magic!’ I’d seen this line swallowed before; I’d seen it delivered straight. Not Rachel. She screamed it, and that scream went right through my broken core, because I had always chosen magic.

I always would, too, because life is hard. Life is insomnia and celebrity diets and endless meetings, bracketed by strangers on Tubes elbowing you in the tits while playing tinny grime on smartphones. There’s your partner doing that thing that makes you wish you’d joined a nunnery and smug friends on Facebook telling you everything they’ve achieved and tabloid papers confirming just how horrendous it all is, and if you get home from all that and you fancy a bit of Dostoyevsky you’re a braver woman than I am. I love chick-lit, or ‘commercial women’s fiction,’ as we hardly ever call it in the trade. It’s like a big, warm, pastel-coloured hug. Sassy friends, stereotypical gays, shopping, handbags, cocktails, hitting a nadir and springing back up like a monkey on a string, all packaged in the pastels of patisserie cakes. If there’s one ridiculous saying, it’s ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ – because if that cover is pink and has shoes on it, you can bet I’ll be on it like Tony Soprano with a lobster roll.

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My novel, After My Own Heart, does not have a shoe on it. It’s not even pink. But if you look at it, it should be pretty obvious that it’s commercial women’s fiction, and that’s not an accident, or because I can’t do anything else. It’s because I like it. My addiction started in my teens. I was staying in London with my uncle; he had a copy of Marian Keyes’ first novel, Watermelon, (yes, he’s gay). At first, I fought the terrible urges to read it– as a teenager I had standards, or at least a mixture of pretension and caffeine that looked a bit like them from a distance, and it took me five tries to read Bridget Jones’ Diary because I couldn’t find the verbs. Still, Marian Keyes remains my first, and staunchest, chick-lit addiction. What’s not to love about Marian? She’s funny, she’s smart, she’s Irish, she gets free makeup and she conquered depression with cake. You don’t see William Styron doing that in Darkness Visible, do you? No you don’t.

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Of course, I’ve got other favourites. Jenny Colgan; Lisa Jewell, who looks like a yummy mummy but writes like a fallen angel; Sophie Kinsella, creator of Becky Bloomwood the consumer wrecking-ball; Jane Green and Adele Parks. Across the pond, my favourite is Philadelphian Jennifer Weiner, whose debut novel Good in Bed and its sequel Certain Girls are both an eloquent defence of chick-lit and an exploration of its limits. Female novelists complain – and with good cause – that male writers get away more easily with ‘thinly disguised autobiography. Updike, Cheever, Yates and Roth ripped out great bleeding chunks of their lives in the name of fiction, but you never saw the New York Times critics rolling their eyes and muttering, ‘God, not his second divorce again; what a frickin’ girl.’

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On top of that, there’s the unavoidable issue of design, marketing and PR – how the books shout out in visual shorthand from the sides of Tube tunnels and the shelves of station bookshops. Finally, there’s the question of intent – did the author want to write a serious book, but had it clothed in chick-lit chinchilla by cowardly editors? Did she set out to write a romantic romp, but found darker themes creeping in? Was she actually having fun, and if so, did no one try to stop her?

was she actually having fun, and if so, did no one try to stop her?

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One of the things I’ve loved about chick-lit is that, despite Mr. Interchangeable waiting at the end, it’s all about women finding – and rescuing – themselves. Yes, there are weddings, and flowers, and macaroons, but who doesn’t need a little escapism? ‘I don’t tell the truth,’ admits Blanche DuBois, ‘I tell what ought to be truth. And if that’s sinful, then let me be damned for it.’ So, we publish – and sometimes, a little too quickly, we’re damned. This damnation isn’t just confined to chick-lit, but spreads out to women’s literature in general. Momentarily putting aside books with ‘Wedding,’ ‘Manolo Blahniks,’ and, er, ‘Heart,’ in the title, even ‘serious,’ novels like Helen Dunmore’s The Siege and Carol Shields’ Unless have been criticised for their attention to the everyday, messy, feminine stuff, the business of feeding your children and wondering whether you still love your husband and spending an afternoon looking for the perfect scarf for your daughter – that makes critics squirm as they bang into that pram in your hall. They don’t seem to get that, while they’re just visiting, some of us – mainly the ones with ovaries – have to live here.

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Even in the rare cases when we choose not to, it’s still hard to avoid. Our mothers ask us when we’re getting married. We’re told that we’re selfish if we want to hang onto our jobs in a cutthroat market; that it’s wrong not to want children, or to have them too late, whenever that is; that we can measure our worth in how quickly we drop the pounds once we’ve had the kids they nagged us about in the first place. So how do you cope with that? Well, you pour yourself a large Pinot Grigio and reach for one of chick-lit’s cousins, mummy-lit. You know, that stuff written by women who live in Notting Hill townhouses and only give the kids organic Rice Krispies.

i’ve got to admit, though, i don’t read that. i’ve got some standards.

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photo story

the end of north morgan

if it happened it might be something like this.

NORTH MORGAN

HIGHLIGHTS OF MISERABLE LIVES

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Memories are for delusional people

who completely lack self-awareness and think that their miserable lives are worth remembering.

Childhood memories are the worst and there are very few undertakings more tedious than listening to a random 20-something trying to bond with a bunch of other tiresome everymen his age, by reminiscing about the cartoons they all used to watch when they were little. Similarly – and in direct competition with reciting one’s dreams for the most unbearable expression of individualism – it is achingly dull to hear grown men go on about loving parents, blissful childhood summers, and secondary school mischief.

Luckily, even on those rare occasions that I suffer clarity of mind due to accidentally under-dosing on sedatives, there are just two singular, isolated incidents that I remember from my childhood: the Arts & Crafts incident and the Lift incident.

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We had A4-sized pieces of card with outlines of basic shapes drawn on them. And we had tiny pieces of coloured paper, each one no bigger than the nail on my small finger. In bright colours, of course, because I was 5 years old and small children are idiots with underdeveloped brains, who can’t distinguish anything unless it’s bright red or has a furry texture or moos like a cow. We were supposed to put glue on the card and stick the pieces of paper on, filling up the inside of each shape. These were the only instructions we were given, I swear.

I started taking each tiny piece of paper, cautiously applying glue to the back of it and slowly placing it flat on the card, each piece next to the previous one, forming seamless lines both across and down. The end result was geometrically perfect, presumably what every sensible human would be inclined to achieve.

North Morgan

arts & crafts

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The next thing I remember is a destructive Greek teacher standing over my head, scolding me for being so careful and meticulous in my task, before proceeding to sloppily apply some glue to my card and sprinkle the tiny pieces of paper over it completely haphazardly. The result was a mess. Some of the pieces were upside down exposing their white underside, some were half-drowning in glue with their dry parts seemingly trying to escape upwards, some were outside the shape borders and there were gaps everywhere. I wanted to cry. And I hated that tramp.

Looking back at the incident, however, she wasn’t to blame. She was Greek, that was all. Faithful to her tribe, she was lazy, imprudent, irresponsible and thoughtless, exhibiting all the key characteristics that, two and a half decades later, would make Greece the plughole that sank that European monetary union. In retrospect, this was probably the day I instinctively decided to distance myself from those people; a decision, which reached its happy apex the day I acquired my British passport at the age of 21.

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The guy in the lift must have pressed the STOP button to make it come to a halt between floors. He got his dick out and a couple of minutes later I felt something wet dripping down the side of my head. I’m still not sure whether it was semen or urine. I was 7 years old and at that point I wasn’t aware that anything else could come out of your willy other than pee. I didn’t even see the incident happen to be honest; I guess I was looking on the floor during the whole time, avoiding making eye contact with the stranger. I don’t even know how we got out of there. Most likely my brother, who was 10 at the time, pressed the alarm, the guy panicked, started the lift again and bolted out when we got to the next floor. We ran up the stairs to the top of the building where my parents’ apartment was and breathlessly blurted everything out to my mum.

North Morgan

the lift

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She was there with some staff and her sister preparing the house for a party she was hosting later in the evening. That’s the reason why she hadn’t been the one waiting for me at the entrance downstairs when the school bus dropped me off, and she’d asked my brother to go meet me instead. I’m unsure of what the party was for. It might have been for my parents’ wedding anniversary, my mum’s birthday, something like that. This was my day now, anyway.

My mum’s sister, always particularly boisterous, ran out and tried to find the guy, but it was too late. My mum took me to the bathroom and started vigorously washing my hair. That’s when she told me the guy had ‘peed’ on me, but looking back on the whole thing, I’m suspicious. Why would a paedophile get trapped in a lift with two minors just to piss on them? Surely we were sexier than that?

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emily foster

graphic writing

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the transition i have made from student to employee in recent months has been a challenging one.

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I expected it to be hard to find work; for this I was prepared. Once I found my job however, I expected everything else to fall into place. I thought I might join a gym, and eat better. I might move out. I even thought I would get out of my overdraft. I have done none of these things. Most of all, after finally breaking out of years of full-time education, I thought I would give my brain a rest, and stop learning. Yup, I thought I knew it all.

The most important thing I have learnt since leaving university is that I will never stop learning. Take writing for example. When we first decided to put this magazine together I thought it would be a great way to showcase our authors and ideas as a young, driven, independent publishing house. Little did I know I would be expected to contribute some of the writing, rather than just the design (much more my comfort zone).

Coming from the field of Graphic Design, most would (safely) assume that writing is not my forté. We Designers may know our Ernst Keller from our Steven Heller – we just don’t know how to get it down on paper. In my final year at university I spent one memorable evening in my housemate’s room, desperately correcting her dissertation the evening before a deadline. Punctuation was practically nonexistent, apart from full stops that appeared in the middle of sentences. (‘...when he was a student at. The Bauhaus...’). The structure occasionally deviated from one endless paragraph into lots of tiny ones at a time. Even she struggled to make sense of it. And yes, English is her first language.

we designers may know our ernst keller from our steven heller -

we just don’t know how to get it down on paper

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Today it has taken me about five hours to write just over 500 words. Decent written skills are something I’ve always tried to keep on top of – in fact, I wouldn’t be here, in my current job, without them. I just think people take you more seriously if you can string a sentence or two together. But why do some designers just ignore these essential skills? Is it because we’re all so overly concerned with the visual? Are we all this narrow minded, or is this just a prejudice we face, that aesthetic talent must be compensated by poor grammar and syntax? Is it even that important?

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Well, I think it is important, and for me it’s down to one thing: having options. Did you know Dylan Jones, the Editor of GQ magazine, first trained in Graphic Design and Photography at Central Saint Martins? As a designer, I think I do OK. I really enjoyed my degree. I like the work that I do. But nowadays it’s likely I’ll be doing that work well past today’s standard age of retirement. After I left university I found myself thinking; is it what I want to do for the rest of my life? Maybe. But my guess is, probably not. Discovering and practicing other skills – like writing this article – and utilizing them with what I already have is something I enjoy. Who knows where it will take me in the future; for now, though, I’m just happy to learn.

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BOBBY NAYYAR

LOVE & BUSINESS

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‘Do you think that you can manage Limehouse Books and have a relationship at the same time?’ Now if I was a bit smarter I probably would have said, ‘Yes’. But no, I wasn’t smart at all. The night, like life, rolled on. The question, however remained stuck in my mind.

I looked back to where it all started. September 2009. I had just been unceremoniously dumped in a Pizza Express in Shepherd’s Bush, before we had even ordered, which came as quite a relief. The ex – a yoga-practicing academic – listed the reasons why she was breaking up with me. One of them was that she didn’t like the way I ate. Though I had to give her that – I do eat like a pig sometimes.

late last year i was having a drink with an attractive woman who asked:

The break up came as I was working through the final days of my notice and planning my as yet unnamed publishing company. Looking back it was fair to say that I had my mind firmly on work, not on any type of relationship. My flat was a complete mess. I had been sleeping on the floor, as I hadn’t ordered a bed. I didn’t have an iron or a fridge. I have lost most of my memories of that autumn and winter. It’s something I can only describe as a cogent madness.

Thankfully the madness receded during the course of 2010 – the reality of making books mixed with the reality of making money descended like a curtain all around me. My money ran out. I lost weight. I had to accept that I needed a second job to pay for my first job. Dating was the last thing on my mind. I did manage to have the only one night stand I’ve ever had. And I hated it.

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In 2011, I had secured a second job, reduced the number of titles we were publishing, and hired Emily Foster. I finally had more time on my hands. The drink with the attractive woman galvanized me to bring balance into my life, i.e. to get laid. And then I met Q. Yes, like a high profile and shocking court case, I’m going to use a pseudonym in reference to this woman. In fairness to her, I will only describe the start and end of our time together. Our story began with the glamour of ballet at the Royal Opera House and ended around midnight at a bus stop in Limehouse.

In between I learned the following:

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DATING MAKES YOU STUPIDER

1 I’ve written a novel, drafted complex contracts, and can communicate in several languages, but at one point I spent an hour drafting a text message. In this situation it pays to have a highly capable assistant, which I do in Emily Foster. She also filled in as a therapist, listening to the minutiae of my dates. I should also point out that Eren Butler filled in as my therapist for about two years. Maybe I should just wind the business up and hire a therapist.

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I AM EXPLICABLY POOR

2 The funny thing about running a business is that people tend to think that you are loaded. When I started out I had lofty dreams of being some sort of publishing playboy, but I soon discovered that it was all hard graft, sleepless nights with triumphs coming at great personal cost. With Q, we followed the usual dating trajectory, at first I was borderline spendthrift, then things evened out and we shared everything equally. After a couple of months, I kept inviting her round to my place to cook dinner. She took it as a casual ploy to get her into bed and refused. It wasn’t. I just couldn’t bear to eat out at restaurants, because to afford the food, I knew I’d have to go hungry for the rest of the week. Plus it was a casual ploy to get her into bed.

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LOVE AND BUSINESS ARE PRETTY MUCH THE SAME

Starting a business is a massive leap into the unknown. In some ways I believe the yoga-practicing academic broke up with me because she didn’t want to watch me fall. And I did fall, but I also flew. In this it is just like love. That moment when you stick your neck out and take a risk. It is this recklessness that can bring great rewards. Or in my case a break up at a bus stop.

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Next time I see the attractive woman, I’m just going to ask her to marry me and be done with it.

EMILY FOSTER / DESIGNER

BOBBY NAYYAR / PUBLISHER

a limehouse books collaboration

Limehouse Books

me. you. everyone.